


take me out to the black

by Hinn_Raven, Sroloc_Elbisivni



Series: You Can't Take the Sky From Me [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefly Fusion, Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-05 00:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11566917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/pseuds/Hinn_Raven, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/pseuds/Sroloc_Elbisivni
Summary: Captain Carolina Church is a turncoat, a browncoat, and the captain of a Firefly Class ship called Valhalla. But every captain needs a crew.





	take me out to the black

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sroloc_Elbisivni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/gifts).



> One year ago today the dear sroloc–elbisivni sent me a message reminding me that we’d brainstormed a vague outline for a Firefly AU. I said “oh yeah that’s right!” and we talked about it for a bit. Then we came up with a different twist on it which inspired me to write about 7k of it in one week. I’ve been sitting on this for a long time, but I finally have part 1 ready for you guys. 
> 
> Who’s up for some space cowboys?
> 
> -hinn_raven

When Carolina had been a child, living in the Core she’d looked up at the blank, orange-tinted night sky, and dreamed of stars.

Now she stares out the big bay windows of the cockpit, staring out at the vast and endless stretch of space before her, and it’s the first time she’s felt at peace since the early days of the war, when she’d been so sure she was fighting for the right reasons.”

“This isn’t enough,” Wash says, beside her. “We’ll need a crew.”

Carolina runs her hands along the pilot’s dash. Neither of them are really good enough at flying to handle it long--just enough to get them away from this planet, get them to place where they can start hiring. “I know,” she says. She’s oddly buoyed by the idea, of filling this ship to bursting, of people who look at her and don’t know what her last name means, don’t know her service record or her history, don’t know why Wash has those scars on his wrists.

She sinks into the pilot’s seat, and carefully continues to steer them.

“What’s her name?” Wash asks her.

“The Vallhala,” she says.

Wash gives her a long, knowing look. The coat he wears is as brown as hers.

“Right then,” he says, and there’s nothing more they need to say.

* * *

Captain Carolina Church is a turncoat, a browncoat, and the captain of a Firefly Class ship called _Valhalla._

Her second in command is a traitor, a browncoat, and a kid from the Rim.

Carolina once had been a Sergeant. She had led a squad, until one night when Connie died in her sleep and Wash had gone missing and she had ripped through layers of security to get him back. She had taken him and ran, ran so hard and so fast that she had practically collapsed at the doorstep of the Independents’ and bargained for sanctuary.

She had not begged.

* * *

The first hire is Lavernius Tucker. He’s a pilot, a good one. Too good to be interested in a ship like hers, which is how she knows he’s hiding something.

He wears colorful shirts and has a mustache that make Wash make a face behind the man’s back, letting Carolina know exactly what he thinks of a man who willingly lets one of those grow on his face. He tells crude jokes. None of those are disqualifying qualities, nothing to stop a man who can fly a Firefly class with the delicacy of a shuttle from flying for any of the major companies.

She expects drugs, or smuggling, neither of which she can afford on her crew, not with the Alliance still breathing down her back. Her pardon for betraying the Alliance, for freeing Wash, is tentative and dubious. But she also can’t afford to pass up a pilot like Tucker.

He’s the one to bring it up, shockingly. They’re almost done with the interview, Carolina having brought him up to the cockpit. “I have a kid,” he tells her abruptly. “He has to come along. It’s a dealbreaker.” His chin goes up, strong and firm.

Carolina flinches. _Children_. She can’t afford to smuggle, not yet, maybe not ever if the way the Alliance keeps coming after them, keeping an eye out for the runaway and the turncoat, but she knows that even if she _can_ stay clean, stay legal, there will be violence. There’s no way there won’t be.

She tells him this.

“He needs to stay with me,” Tucker says, something desperate in his eyes. He needs this job as much as she needs a pilot, she realizes. “This is what I’m good at.”

Carolina looks around the ship. “How old is he?” Maybe they’ll be lucky and he’s a teenager, barely need looking after.

She should know better than to reach for luck. She hasn’t had luck on her side for a long, long time. Things never go smooth.

“Four.”

Carolina swears, under her breath.

In her mind, she begins to calculate additional child-rations, child-proofing the rooms, making sure that weapons aren’t just laid out in the open.

She doesn’t give Tucker an answer yet, but she already knows what it will be.

* * *

Wash grows up on the Rim.

It’s a tiny little planet called Iowa. He grows up with three sisters and a brother, the oldest of them all, and when he gets the scholarship to military school, he takes their photograph in his pocket, his father’s blessing, every coin his family can spare, and his mother’s lucky pistol.

They take the pistol when he gets to basic training, and he never sees it again. The coin goes quickly; Core living is expensive.

He loses the photograph in the war, when they come for him in the night.

The Alliance and the Core is inherently different from Iowa. They change his name because they can’t pronounce it, and Wash learns to adapt, even though he hates it, hates the way that the smooth syllables of home are butchered in the mouths of these Core-worlders, who don’t know what it feels like to stand in the dirt and look at the sky and smile. Wa-Jonathan, son of Jonathan, smoothed and disturbed over time and time again, until the name is Washington, harsh and biting in the voice of his drill master. And he feels further still from his siblings every time they said it, until one day Wash was bleeding from the mouth on the ground, and he looks up into a set of eyes as green as fresh leaves.

“Fighting again, Wash?” Carolina asks, and she holds out her hand.

Wash doesn’t know it then, when he reaches up and takes it, but he now has another sister. A sister in battle and blood, as real and important as any of the ones he left back home.

She graduates before him, but when she gets her own squad, she calls on him, and Wash goes, eager to follow his sister into combat.

Their squad is good at what they do, but then one day Connie leans close and whispers in his ear.

“We can’t trust them, Wash,” she whispers. “We can’t.”

The next day, Connie dies, and Wash doesn’t know what side the bullet comes from.

Wash starts to look for answers on his own.

He never does find them.

All he finds is the inside of a strange white room and the sounds of his own screaming when the stick needles into his eyes.

* * *

Wash is the one to bring back Grif and Simmons. Grif can fly a shuttle even better than Tucker, Simmons dabbles in mechanics, and is a decent field-medic, and both are steady shots and decent at listening to orders in a fight.

Neither of them fought in the war, she learns. Their skills are those of people who lived on the Rim for so long, not the product of any schooling or training.

Grif is the one who tells Carolina the stories of the Reavers for the first time, and his eyes are haunted enough that Carolina knows better than to ask if he’s ever seen one.

Epsilon curls up in her lap and purrs until she stops thinking about what it is that someone could see, out in the blackness of space, that could turn a human being into something like _that_.

Simmons wants to be the mechanic, but he’s never worked on anything bigger than a Mule, and it shows. Carolina almost hates to do it, but she pulls him off and hires the first mechanic she can find who has a recommendation.

In retrospect, she should have realized that Doc’s ship was a bit too eager to be rid of him.

* * *

Carolina desperately searches for another mechanic, loathe to risk flying a ship as old as _Valhalla_ without one, but she keeps turning up dry until she walks into the engine room to find Doc having sex with a man named Donut, who turns out to be a thousand times more competent than Doc.

She keeps Doc on as a medic, because Simmons can do stitches and that’s about it. Doc’s still not good as a medic, but he’s better a medic than he was a mechanic, and Carolina’s learning to live with that.

Wash is a bit preoccupied when Donut comes onto the scene, because Tucker just shaved off that awful mustache, and Wash has been staring at him moony eyed, too distracted to barely even acknowledge that Carolina’s hired a new person.

Then of course, he comes into the dining area one day, and yells, “ _Frank_?” Far too loud.

“ _David_?” Donut yells back.

It turns out Carolina managed to hire Wash’s brother, from their old backwater homeworld. He’d decided to go see the ‘verse after the war.

Carolina listens to them listing names of people she doesn’t know and places she’ll never be, because Wash is avoiding his home world the same way she’s avoiding the Core, and goes to her bunk, staring at the photo sheet she has, of the last time she saw her brother.

She opens up the program, starts writing.

 

_Church,_

 

_~~I realize it’s been a while~~ _

 

_~~I’m sorry I had to save him~~ _

 

_~~I didn’t mean to~~ _

 

_~~I was right~~ _

 

_~~Are you okay?~~ _

 

Frustrated, she throws it across the room and closes her eyes. He’s the one who broke contact, she reminds herself. He doesn’t want to talk to her. He hasn’t forgiven her for betraying the Alliance.

Maybe he would, if she could tell him. Tell him about Connie, about Maine, about what they did to Wash, in that awful room.

But she doesn’t dare. Her pardon is tentative enough as it is. They’re above the board, barely, and she needs to keep it that way, because the Alliance will grab Wash and lock him away again if they so much as step over the line.

Her ship is clean, as much as that strains the funds. No smuggling, no robbery, no crime. And because of that, Wash is safe.

She _has_ to keep it that way.

* * *

“So, what’s the story with you and the cap?”

Wash looked up from the potato he was peeling as Tucker plopped himself down on the counter. Their pilot of three months' mustache twitched as he waggled his eyebrows. “I mean, I know you fought Independent together and all, but you seem, I dunno, really close."

Wash went back to the potatoes. “We survived one of the bloodier battles of the war together. That sort of thing tends to make some pretty strong bonds. Where’s Junior?”

“Napping. C’mon, spilllll. You two have some kind of _history_ together.”

Wash sighed and grabbed a new potato. “If I explain, will you cook dinner tonight?” For once, they had fresh produce, and if he tried to make anything with it, it would come out a charred mess.

“Sure, dude.” He settled into the table and looked at Wash expectantly, so much like his son when he wanted a story that Wash had to chuckle.

“We were in military academy together.”

“Shit, the Browncoats had a military school? I didn’t know that.”

“They didn’t.”

Wash kept his eyes on the curl of the peel away from his knife, but he still knew when Tucker figured it out.

” _Shit_.” And it was in a tone of voice Wash hadn’t expected—a little bit awed and a little bit impressed and a lot sympathetic. “Are—were you from the Core, too?”

Wash didn't think Carolina had told Tucker about her past, but he was never able to bring himself to tell her that for all her hard work, her background was still there for anyone with good perception to notice. It was surprising that Tucker, of all people, had noticed.

“No.” And because surprises seemed to be the theme of this conversation, Wash let himself tell a story he hadn’t in years. “I was born on the Rim. Earned a scholarship to go to a fancy Core military school when I was sixteen. That’s where Carolina and I met. When we graduated, we were split up for a couple of years. After the war started, she earned herself a commission as leader of a special squad, and requested I join it.”

And because Tucker still hadn't cut in with a dumb joke or comment, just sat there with a listening face on, Wash let himself remember.

“One of the other members was a friend of mine. She was smart, smarter than the rest of us, and she didn’t like the war. Didn’t trust it. She told me one night that she’d been doing some research, learned some bad things. The next day, she was killed in action. I never figured out which way the bullet came from.” He kept up a steady motion of his knife, scraping every bit of skin away before picking up another potato.

“I started doing some research of my own. Wanted to figure out what she was so worried about. And then, one night…”

The knife stilled as Wash stared into the middle distance, barely seeing Tucker.

“I was outside. I know that much. Then I…wasn’t. And I really don’t remember much of anything else for a bit, except pain, until I opened my eyes and saw Carolina’s face.” With the fingers of the hand holding the knife, he rubbed absently against his other wrist.

“She tells me I went missing, and she went looking, and she found me tied up and screaming. They told her I’d been arrested for treason. She didn’t believe them. Lucky for me.

“The rest of our squad was either dead or reassigned, we were getting orders that made less and less sense, and I was drugged out of my mind and in transport to some unknown location. That was the last straw. Carolina grabbed all the information she could take with her and took us both over to the Independents.”

Wash blinked off the memories and went back to peeling the potato.

“We were both pardoned, after the War, but. We try and avoid the Core now. Mostly brings trouble.”

“Hey, you picked me up in the Core!”

Wash gave Tucker a flat look. “And you’re trouble.” Something occurred to him. “Why are you asking, anyways?”

“Speaking of trouble—I think Carolina’s got the hots for our new renter.”

“The _Companion_?” Well, that was a surprise.

Tucker dropped himself into the chair next to Wash. “Well, I dunno if she gets the _hots_ , but she doesn’t act with him like she does with anyone else. And I wasn’t sure if you two were, you know…” He waved a hand in the air. “And I wanted to make sure no one got hurt.”

“Really.”

“Really! I don’t want to lose a job because the captain and only sane person on the ship started to fight all the time. Shit’s annoying. ‘Sides…”

Wash looked up from his potato to find that Tucker’s face was very close to his.

“I may have had a, uh…personal interest, too.”

He grinned at Wash, big and bright and kind and wonderful and—

  1. _shit._



Wash stood up so fast Tucker almost toppled over.

“I don’t kiss anyone with a mustache,” he blurted out before dumping the potato on the table and walking—at an entirely reasonable pace, thank you very much—to his quarters.

* * *

They pick up the old man on a distant moon on a distanter-still planet. He’s a grizzled old man, with big eyebrows and a white beard, but there’s a gleam in his eye that puts Carolina on edge. He’s a shepherd, he tells them, but if that’s his first job Carolina would eat her coat. The only names he gives them are “Shepherd” and “Sarge”. But he pays his rent and doesn’t preach too loudly and makes good tea.

He brings with him Caboose, and Caboose is definitely worth taking on a passenger, even a wandering shepherd. Caboose is strong and tall and broad, with a big goofy smile and hair that falls into his eyes more often than not. He can carry more than the rest of the crew put together and he’s shockingly good in a fight. There’s no rhyme or reason to him; he’s loud and cheerful and ocassionally dumber than rocks, but he has moments of brilliance that Carolina doesn’t know to do with. And he talks to the ship.

But Carolina figures it’s not the strangest thing to happen on _Valhalla_ , so she takes it. She can hardly begrudge the man a few eccentricities, not with Epsilon in her cabin.

* * *

She found Epsilon when she went back to Valhalla. The valley, not the ship.

She gets off the shuttle, tokens for the dead in her pockets. She’s not much for religion, but she’s got sticks of incense and a few flowers to leave at the memorial.

She turns her face to the sky and waits, listening for the voices of the dead that she knows she won’t hear.

Instead, she hears meowing.

The cat is small and scrawny, with matted blue-grey fur and bright blue eyes. He’s hissing, his back arched, and Carolina doesn’t know anything about cats but she knows he doesn’t want her to come near.

Carolina knows the feeling.

She reaches into her pockets and takes out the small fishcake she brought to offer up to Maine’s ghost. He’d loved these things. But he’ll understand her giving it to a cat.

When she goes back to _Valhalla_ (the ship, not the valley), the cat comes with her.

* * *

Wash opens his eyes and groans, clutching the side of his head as another headache spikes.

Tucker, sprawled across his chest, pushes himself up onto his elbows and glances at him. “Headache again?” He mutters.

“Yeah,” Wash says in reply, screwing his eyes shut. “They’re happening more lately.”

Tucker takes Wash’s wrist in his hand, carefully running his thumb along the scar along the inside, from where the IV had been attached, before Carolina had ripped it out, not caring about proper procedure in her rush to get him _away_. “Think it means something?” Tucker asks, and his other hand pushes Wash’s hair off his sweat-streaked forehead.

Wash winces as it spikes again, and the only reply he is capable of giving is a groan.

“Nevermind,” Tucker said, dropping his hand. “You stay here, I’ll get you some of that soothing tea that Sarge has.”

Wash shivers, suddenly freezing. He burrows into the covers, almost distracted from his migraine by the sudden, desperate need for _warmth_.

His eyes sink shut.

_“What do you see? What do you feel?” The chair is hard and uncomfortable, and the straps are digging in against his skin._

_“What do you know?” There’s blood, so much blood, the taste of it clear in his mouth._

_“If you just cooperate, Corporal, this will end,” the man’s accent is grating but his eyes are familiar, and Wash opens his mouth to scream again._

“Wash!” Junior is on his chest. “Wash!”

Wash let out a gasp, and sat up. “Junior?” He says, groggy with sleep and disoriented by the memories.

“You were screaming again,” Junior says. His small face is very close to Wash’s own, his big brown eyes concerned.

“Sorry,” Wash rasps. “Did I wake you?”

“No, I did,” Carolina says, and Wash groans.

“What is it, Boss?”

“We’re taking on passengers, Wash,” she says, looking annoyed. “I came to check on you, see if I need to have Donut play host instead.”

“I’m fine,” Wash says. Indeed, his headache has dissipated. “Where’s Tucker?”

“He had to run to the pit,” Carolina says, handing Wash the mug of tea. “York’s flying in.”

“So soon?” Wash cradles the tea, savoring the scent. None of them know how Sarge makes this tea, but it’s one of the few luxuries they have, out here in the dark.

Carolina shrugs. “I didn’t ask.”

“I’ll be there,” Wash promises. “Who do we have?”

“A businessman on his way to visit his family on a colony, and a woman who says she’s a new colonist. Pretty sure she’s a merc,” Carolina adds, her expression dark. “Too many scars otherwise.”

Wash pauses, halfway out of bed. “Trouble, boss?”

“I don’t know.”

“What side, do you think?”

“Can’t say,” Carolina reaches down to pick up Junior. “I’ll let you get dressed.”

“Thanks,” Wash says.

“See you on deck, Wash.” Carolina climbs up the ladder, leaving Wash alone with his thoughts and his tea.

Wash puts on his clothes and finds his gun, holstering it at his side as usual.

The headache is still there, pounding in his temples, but it’s manageable. It’s odd, they usually don’t last this long. They usually just spike, painfully but briefly, then fade away. This is constant, and he doesn’t like it. It’s putting him on edge.

He puts on his wedding ring, and briefly runs a damp comb through his hair to tame it enough to make himself presentable.

He goes down to the cargo bay, and he examines the two people there. One’s a man with an impressive mustache, already laughing at something Donut’s said. The other... something about her makes Wash’s skin crawl. Blonde hair, muscles, all in black, and she’s wearing dark glasses, standing in front of a tall, metal crate with a blank expression.

“Welcome to the Valhalla,” Wash says as he makes his way down towards her. Carolina was right, she’s covered in scars. She’s either very bad at being a merc, or very good. Either way, Wash wants her off the ship as soon as possible. “I’m Wash, the second in command. What’s your name?”

Her eyes dart across him, not even pausing on the brown coat he wears, and shrugs. “Call me Tex,” she says, placing a hand against the side of the crate.

“That’s it?”

“It’s not like I’ll be staying around.” Her eyes are challenging. She isn’t wearing a gun openly, but Wash didn’t doubt she was armed.

Wash nods, then turned to talk to the other man.

He _hates_ taking on passengers.

 


End file.
